


The Clockwork Sonnet

by asuralucier



Category: Call Me By Your Name (2017), Call Me by Your Name - André Aciman
Genre: Academic Hogwash, Age Difference, Character Death, F/M, Gen, Illness, Internalized Homophobia, M/M, Oliver has a midlife crisis, Oliver plays the piano for plot related purposes, Oliver's gambling problem, Time Travel, poor Oliver's family, wonky physics
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2018-10-01
Updated: 2019-06-24
Packaged: 2019-07-23 06:51:38
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 2
Words: 5,118
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/16153856
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/asuralucier/pseuds/asuralucier
Summary: In 2003: Oliver attends Elio Perlman’s funeral, having never met him. In 1987: Oliver and Elio meet for the first time.(Inspired by this bit in the novel: "You are the only person I'd like to say goodbye to when I die, because only then will this thing I call my life make any sense. And if I should hear that you died, my life as I know it, the me who is speaking with you now, will cease to exist.”)





	1. The Funeral

**Author's Note:**

  * For [PillSlayer](https://archiveofourown.org/users/PillSlayer/gifts).



Before the funeral of Elio Perlman, I’d only attended two other funerals in my life.

One, was the funeral of my maternal grandfather, whom I called _Zaydeh_ , although my boyhood tongue had bastardized it to _Zaydee_ , which always made him laugh. That’s what I remembered most about him, that he’d _laughed_. _Zaydeh_ had a large, loud, bellying laugh and unlike other experiences that I might have had while I was learning my speech for my Bar Mitzvah, he had made sure to laugh at every one of my mistakes and stumbles. During my actual speech, I could detect his laugh floating above everyone else’s as he’d suffered through my reading of it, probably nearly a hundred times, if not more.

My remembering _Zaydeh_ ’s laugh made the silence at his funeral all the more unbearable. Between the eulogy given by my mother and the reading from Psalms by one of my cousins, there was me. The funeral home had an old stand-up piano that they had moved into the parlor. With my Uncle Simon and his guitar, we’d led the family in a rousing chorus of “Why Worry?” In between the refrain, the silences seemed to me a little less what they were.

_Why worry?_  
_There should be laughter after pain_  
_There should be sunshine after rain_  
_These things have always been the same_  
_So why worry now_  
_Why worry now..._

My second experience with a funeral was when one of my classmates had unexpectedly passed away in my A.P. Latin course when I was in my senior year of high school. The tragedy had occurred in early November, when it’d become resolutely cold but not yet chilly. I’d had a lot of things on my mind then. College, mostly. Whether or not I’d wanted to go all out on my Ivies, or if I wanted to be a less achieving person and go somewhere certainly inoffensive, but certainly also average, like Boston, or UConn, or one of the SUNYs upstate. Of similar, but not quite as pressing concern, was whether or not my then-girlfriend Wendy Gateshill and I would break up depending on where I ended up for college. Even looking back on it now, I realized I did like Wendy in a simple way. She could talk about books; she’d always hit with me in tennis when I needed a partner, and she liked giving me head. For reasons I no longer recalled or cared to, I never went near her vagina and she never complained about my not doing so.

That I might end up dead, suddenly and without warning had never passed through either of our minds. Wendy, being a year below me, didn’t even know who Craig was.

I’d stopped thinking about that for all of a day, when the morning announcements had included the mention that Craig Harrow had died. A car had run him over just over the weekend, and he’d lived for what must have been an excruciating forty hours in the Intensive Care Unit. His parents had flown over from Los Angeles, halfway around the continent, a place wholly unfathomable to me from my desk in East Greenwich, Rhode Island. I didn’t know until Craig had kicked it that he’d lived with his aunt and uncle just a few blocks away from me.

Our teacher Mrs. Lazaro had insisted that the class sign a condolence card. _Zaydeh_ had been dead about six years by then, and I remembered thinking, that _Sorry for your loss, Mr. and Mrs. Harrow. Craig was a good friend of mine. Best Wishes, Oliver._ had been a strange thing for me to write in the card but it was like my hand had moved on its own without prompting, before I could even really think about it. All of the letters had seemed even more alien now that they’d formed words. Not to mentioned I’d lied. I hadn’t been good friends with Craig. He’d once asked if he could borrow my notes on irregular genitives. I’d said yes. I didn’t think that made us friends.

His funeral wasn’t a funeral at all. It’d been a vigil at the intersection where the car had hit and killed him. As far as I knew they’d never caught the driver and the town was up in arms about it for months on account of the fact that nothing interesting happened in my part of New England. I’d burned my hand on my candle and my mother had fretted over whether I could still play Mozart for her bookclub as I did every week before they dove into _Persuasion_. As if that was important.

But just like that Craig Harrow was dead. But at least I’d known him, a little. He had loopy, quasi-girlish handwriting and his O’s were especially fat. O liver.

Though it was probably unfair to say I hadn’t known Elio Perlman at all. We’d never met face to face that summer I went to visit his family to work with his father. That aside, his presence was all over the villa: I slept in Elio’s room; I borrowed his bicycle to go into town; I was welcome to leaf through his transcriptions of Bach if it was something I was interested in, and of course, I was free to borrow his books to read. He had enough books to fill up a small library. Elio’s literary passions extended mostly to modern works, to existential literature as if he was trying to burrow himself back in time and live a sort of depression, a deep crisis of the soul that made one so unfamiliar to oneself, but everywhere he looked, he could find even lonelier souls who understood him.

The story went that Elio would have otherwise been around, but he’d gotten himself a girlfriend and with no small amount of mirth, Annella had informed me that Marzia, lovely, lively girl, had managed to convince Elio, who was “lovely, not so lively” that it would be a great idea for them to pack a bag each and hitchhike down to Paris with nonsensical stops in places like Luxembourg, or Brussels, should they feel like. Annella is nothing like my own mother; the idea that I was going to pack a bag just to shoot off on a grand adventure to Paris would have given her a coronary. She had a weak heart anyway. Something about the veins being thin.

“ -- Sounds like they’re visiting the EU, getting a headstart on his career, maybe?” I said wanting to be funny, and then immediately kicked myself for sounding so American. I should have kept my mouth shut. It wasn’t even really funny or made any sort of sense. Later, as I got to know him, in another world, in my imagination, I came too, to laugh at myself.

“I’m sure my son has lots of aspirations in his life,” Samuel laughed at me and handed me a cigarette to smoke out on the porch. “But I think diplomacy might not be in his veins. He’s a stubborn boy.”

“And I wonder who he gets that from?” Annella laughed. She wasn’t sitting with us but you could hear her easily enough from the kitchen. “To be fair, we didn’t think travelling by via backpack and charity was in his blood either, did we, Samuel?”

“Any day now, we’ll probably get a call from him begging for a plane ticket home.” Samuel assented. “Which we will send, with love, but we might have to give him a hard time before. Or else what kind of parents would we be?”

 

At the dawn of the new millennium, a snapshot of my life: I am nearing forty. (From a novel whose name I cannot recall for the life of me: “At what point does one become fortyish?”) I live with my family (a wife, two sons, a dog, and most inexplicably, a pair of sugar gliders named Guildenstern and Rosencranz). I work at a good university in Minnesota and once met Gilles Deleuze when he came to speak. I met Gilles through his translator Brian Massoumi; Brian often gives me translating jobs that he doesn’t want. I am able to afford yearly vacations for my family and my elder son has expressed interest about attending West Point and working in military intelligence given all that’s happened recently. My wife and I are not hard up for money, so for the first time, I donate to the campaign of a junior senator. It’s not so bad to look ahead.

I am late to Elio Perlman’s funeral. I tell myself I don’t mean to be, but since a man is alone in his head, his lies are always on full display to himself.

I am struck by the group in the room. It’s another funeral parlor, but nobody is wearing black. I’m wearing black, but it hadn’t been a hardship for me, especially. I slip into a vacant seat next to a girl with blue hair. When I say girl, that’s what I mean -- she can’t have been more than nineteen. She squeezes my hand and then lets go, as if to let me know that I am welcome.

Welcome at a funeral. I’m uncomfortable when irony sticks so close to skin.

“And now,” says the man standing up at the podium. “He’d probably kill us for all singing so off-key, but we can’t let him off the hook, can we?” A wave of appreciative laughter courses its way through the crowd. “C’mon, all together now. Elio, this is for you.”

Someone hits a hard B on a bass, starting on a bassline I find catchy despite myself and my situation. It’s like I’m the only one not in on this joke. The girl next to me taps her foot in anticipation and nods encouragingly at me. The lyrics are for some reason in German but everyone again, seems to know the words:

_Im Sturz durch Raum und Zeit_  
_Richtung Unendlichkeit_  
_Fliegen Motten in das Licht_  
_Genau wie Du und Ich_

_Irgendwie fängt irgendwann_  
_Irgendwo die Zukunft an_  
_Ich warte nicht mehr lang_  
_Liebe wird aus Mut gemacht_  
_Denk nicht lange nach_  
_Wir fahr’n auf Feuerrädern_  
_Richtung Zukunft durch die Nacht_

_Gib mir die Hand Ich bau dir ein Schloss aus Sand_  
_Irgendwie irgendwo irgendwann_  
_Die Zeit ist reif_  
_Für ein bisschen Zärtlichkeit_  
_Irgendwie irgendwo irgendwann_

Elio Perlman, I decide, is nothing like the boy I thought I knew.

 

Samuel Perlman insists on buying me dinner. When I ask if he’d rather spend the time with someone else (I don’t have anyone in mind), he responds that he’s too old to catch up with his son’s friends and is happy enough that they all came together celebrate him one last time.

To my eye, Samuel is mostly unchanged. His hair is whiter, his beard more coarsed through with salt-and-pepper than the last time I’d seen him, and his glasses are thicker, but his gaze is clear, even jovial and I wonder where all this has come from, that he’s managed to be so happy to see me.

“I was so pleased to hear about your tenure confirmation,” he says. “Well deserved.”

“Yes, well,” I am unsure what to say. Most people would have been happier to receive tenure, I think, but I’d always expected tenure to come and when it came, all that changed was the name on my office door and the amount of money in my bank account. “I think it helped that you knew Professor Meisner.” Meisner had been the most senior member of my hearing committee. The only thing I really knew about him was that his wife was younger than mine and that he enjoyed cigars.

“Nonsense,” Samuel waves me away. “You were one of the brightest to have come worked for me during the summer at the villa. I was sorry to see you go, as was my wife. One of these days, you’ll have to start giving yourself more credit.” At the mention of Annella, Samuel’s energy seems to have dampened itself in an instant. “Annie would have been here, she was looking forward to seeing you, but --”

“Don’t worry about it,” I say. “Give her my love, of course. But I...I’m sorry, Samuel. I can’t even begin to fathom what you’re going through. We could have rescheduled.”

Samuel looks at me over the rim of his wineglass, “You have children, don’t you, Oliver?”

“Yes, I do.” I say but I don’t reach for my wallet to show him pictures the way some people would have done. “Nathaniel’s nearly fifteen, I can’t believe it. Michael’s just turned twelve.”

Now that Nathaniel is not that long way away from seventeen, I think that I would have a had a coronary if he’d brought up the fact that he wanted to backpack around Europe.

“Then you can fathom it,” Samuel says. “But I wouldn’t suggest you do, or wish it upon you. Elio had a good life. He had someone to love him until the very end, someone to laugh for him when he wouldn’t or couldn’t.”

I think about Elio’s copy of _La Nausée_ , nestled neatly next to Rilke’s _Die Aufzeichnungen des Malte Laurids Brigge_. I don’t know why I am stuck on these two books in particular, “What will you do with all his books?”

This makes Samuel laugh, “That’s right. His books would have practically squeezed you out of his bedroom back in the day. Do your boys read?”

“Not Rilke nor Sartre,” I say. “But I make them read the paper every morning.”

“Annella and I had a joke,” Samuel says. “It went something like this: ‘In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was Elio.’ He started talking around two months, started devouring words around three.”

I drink more wine. I am probably drinking Samuel’s share of the wine too. But I like to think this -- whatever this is -- is helping him.

“But, to Elio’s books, why don’t you drop by before you leave? When do you leave?”

“End of the week. I mean, I technically leave Monday, but I am free enough before then.” I say. It is Tuesday today.

“Nolan gave back all of Elio’s books when Elio became too ill to enjoy them,” Samuel says. “We’ve kept a couple at the house, but most of it is in the garage. We probably can’t bear to put them up, not for a while...I would like to think that his books would have been useful to someone else. Come by during the weekend and take some with you. I’ll write down my address for you somewhere.”

 _Nolan_. My mind clings to the name like static. But then I let it go. I take out a receipt from my wallet. “Here.”

Samuel takes out a pen from breast pocket and scribbles down an address in Westchester County. “You would have liked him, Elio.”

I think of the unruly crowd that belted out of tune German at Elio’s funeral. The thought of us ever getting along seems both alien and absurd, “Would I have?”

“I think so,” Samuel nods and reaches to refill his wine. “I think you would have seen through how shy he was. And forgiven him more for it than he has been.” Then he shrugs and folds the receipt neatly in quarters. He slides it back towards me across the table, almost reverently.

“I.” I pocket the receipt, glad to have something to do. I’m not much of a poetry person, mostly because I don’t understand what it means. What I do understand is the way some poetry weighs on my ribcage as if trying to beat acknowledgement into my heart. “I’m afraid I don’t know what you mean, Samuel.”

“I mean,” Samuel starts and then stops. “I don’t know what I mean. But isn’t it funny to think about?”

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> This fic is split into four parts, kind of inspired by the structure of a Shakespearean Sonnet with an abab, cdcd, efef, gg rhyming pattern. The couplet at the end usually demonstrates a heroic turn in order to “resolve” the problem presented in the first three quatrains. I tried to write a sonnet using the chapter titles, but haha that is so not happening. Sorry. 
> 
> The two songs used for both funerals are, respectively: [Why Worry](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KXy8V03x1Ew) written by Mark Knopfler, originally performed by Dire Straits, but have the Art Garfunkel version just because. [Irgendwie Irgendwo, Irgendwann](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-g0LEMZvulw) is used at Elio’s funeral; English lyrics are provided in the video. “Why Worry” requires a bit of a creative license because it was released in 1985 and _Zaydeh_ dies a decade earlier, but there is something about the song that makes me think that he could have been a folk song of sorts and therefore more long-lived. Nena’s “Irgendwie, Irgendwo, Irgendwann” is era appropriate being released in 1984. Do yourself a favor and do NOT listen to the English version done with Kim Wilde in the 00s. Like what. 
> 
> Samuel quotes John 1:1, using the King James Bible version. 
> 
> Sartre’s _Nausea_ is worth checking out as is Rainer Maria Rilke’s _The Notebooks of Malte Laurids Brigge_. Warning: both are depressing.
> 
> The "fortyish" quote is from Don DiLillo's 1977 (first published in the UK in 1991) novel _The Players_. It manages to make fruit sound both moralistic and depressing, so uh, start from there I guess. 
> 
> Also hi, PillSlayer, this is your time traveling!Oliver fic! I apologize for basically everything that is about to happen because I don’t science/physics. Thanks a million for putting up with my crazy!


	2. So We Leave, and are Always Taking Leave

A simple riddle -- designed to challenge and destablize what we see as gendered norms, but speaks, I think, more to the natural mysteries related to one’s parentage, and then expanding out into the very secrets of universe: 

A boy and his father are in a serious plane crash. The father dies and the boy, barely alive is rushed to the hospital. The surgeon who is set to operate on the boy, says: “I cannot do the operation. That boy is my son.” Why? 

Answer: the surgeon is the boy’s mother. Not the boy’s uncle whom he (the boy) might see as a second father, or that the boy has been inexplicably adopted by same-sex parents. 

But then, you start to wonder other things, if you’re anything like me. Such as why the boy was on a plane, where they were traveling to, whether he liked his father and could stand to sit next to him for hours and hours. If the father was ashamed of what a singular orgasm produced, or if the son wanted at all the life that his old man was capable of giving. 

There’s also the biology of it -- _bio_ logy. The study of life which deigns itself a science but all of the things it proclaims to be natural and explainable through chemistry and then, segueing into physics, and then finally, as Galileo once wrote, all of the universe is knowable through the “language of mathematics” because God deemed it to be so -- remains God _like_. Now it becomes a question of faith: how much do you believe and trust in man, the mere image of God? In some iterations of such beliefs, a man is nothing in the confines of the universe. That man, in the image of God, cannot even stand to look into the eyes of angels who hold in their gazes and bodies, a terrifying beauty that could tear asunder a man’s mind with a merest glimpse. 

A glimpse at this terrible beauty can perhaps be found in the beginning of any person’s life: what are the chances that a single sperm found its way into a certain egg, and how many pairs of alleles must come together to make one living, breathing person? Once a baby takes his first breath and cries his first cry, he is in essence announcing his own death, although he doesn’t know it yet. At the births of both of my sons, I spared not a thought for their already shortening telomeres, their impending deaths.

 

At my hotel, paid for by a travel bursary, I order a bottle of Chablis. I hardly get to travel alone anymore because the university respects my commitment to family, so it’s always nice to have some time. While I wait for my wine to show up, I call my wife (not my sons, who probably also have nothing to say to me). If there is anything that impresses me about Samuel Perlman, it’s his nearness to his son; his tremendous capacity for understanding Elio, even as a young man, the time when a son wishes to shed his father’s skin and maybe too, his father’s teachings. 

“...Hello?” 

“Hi, it’s me,” I tell my wife. My wife is Pamela Cline, we were introduced through mutual friends and became mutual friends ourselves. She’s always thinking about changing her name, although she has never thought to really set the wheels in motion. I make sure that I tell her I always think of her as my wife, but not in a sexist way. In the way that suggests instead, that I never have known myself without a woman behind me. I don’t think I am explaining it very well, but I mean no harm. Besides, there’s just something unwieldy about the name Pamela Payne, although we’ve never talked explicitly about it being absurd. 

“Hi,” she parrots back. “How’s New York?” 

“Expensive,” I say. “The wine at dinner made me cry.” 

“Because it was terrible or because you had to pay for it?” 

“Neither,” I say. “It was good. But even reading the price tag hurts.” 

“What are you going to do when Nathaniel gets to college?” 

“Curl up and never get out of bed again,” I try. “Or become buddy buddy with Senator whatsit and make him pay for it. I’m kidding, how are the boys?” 

“If you’re going to become friends with the big guns, at least learn his name; it’s...oh, I don’t remember. Womack, I think. Michael’s out with his,” my wife pauses. “Soccer friends, should be, it’s a Tuesday, isn’t it? Should be back any minute now. Nate’s at home. Do you want to speak with him?”

“What would I say?” 

She makes a noise in her throat, “ _Oliver_.” 

“I’m serious. I still can’t believe he wants to go to _West Point_.” I’ve never hit Nathaniel, my wife would have never approved, and I also don’t see the point. I guess I don’t understand it, this need for more order in his life, to have every hour of his life accounted for. A cousin of mine did ROTC at a university in Florida. He’d learned the amazing trick of dividing up seconds in his head. He always knew how time passed, the exact moment when one second traded in for its successor. 

“If you disapprove, you should say.” My wife says, “I don’t mind either way, but if you do.” 

“I’ve always thought of myself as a pacifist,” I admit. There’s a knock on the door and I go to trade a five dollar bill for an ice bucket and wine. 

“Nate wants to work in intelligence,” Pamela interjects. “You can think about it this way, if he does his job, less people will probably die. He does his part in preserving the peace.” 

“I don’t think that’s how it works,” I say. “But I don’t want to become one of those fathers. I want my son to be happy.” 

She sighs, “It’s not me you have to convince, darling.” I don’t really like the way she does that, calls me “darling” like she’s trying to make me into glass. Near the beginning, when what we had going was probably what you could call a _courtship_ , she’d always tell me that I’m not vulnerable enough, like her words looked forward to a transformation. Now, I think she’s since given up and so I just get _darling_. 

“Fine,” I fetch a glass from the little stand next to the minibar and tip Chablis into it. “I’ll speak to him. You can put Nathaniel on.”

The silence on her end is needlessly judgmental, but then my wife says, “Give me a minute?” 

“It’s not like I have anywhere else to be.” 

While the other end of the line is silent, I practically chug my wine. Alcohol is an apt defense against awkwardness. I’ve always known that, what I didn’t know was that I’d still need it when speaking to my son. After so many years, perhaps I’ve finally cracked it: all the things he couldn’t say to me drove my father to drink. 

“...Dad?” 

“Hi, Nate,” I say. It’s either the wine or the two minutes I had to collect my nerves, because I follow up without thinking, “Do you want anything from New York?”

“Like what?” 

I was once sent to Milan for a conference, when Nathaniel and Michael were eight and five respectively. I’d brought home all manners of candied fruits, from the less offensive candied lemons and apricots, to the slightly strange soured cherries and figs. The way they’d devoured the sweets as part of dessert had done my heart good. It’d only done a dive when Pamela squeezed my hand, “...They _do_ love you, you know. You don’t have to try so hard.” 

“...I don’t know,” I look down at my wine, as if it holds answers to lifelong questions. 

“It’s not as if New York is another _country_ ,” Nathaniel says. “I really don’t need anything, Dad.” 

“New York is,” I inhale deeply. “I can get practically anything from New York. I’d just like to get you something.” 

Again, there’s a flat quiet on the other end. A calculating sort of silence, as if Nathaniel’s already started to count the minutes. The end goal being that he wants to be away from me. “You don’t have to, okay? I don’t _want_ anything. I’m -- I’m going to go, okay?” 

“Wait,” I say. “Wait, wait one second, okay?” 

I think I can hear him breathing still.

“I went to a funeral today, Nate.” I breathed out. “It made me think about West Point. Are you...you sure?” 

“Did the person that died go there?” 

“Well, no.” I shake my head; it’s either that or I wince at how abrupt it is, as if the Minnesotan winter has seeped into his bones to shut me out forever. “I mean, I don’t think so. But I did get to talk to Elio’s dad, and it just all really made me think.” I tip my Chablis into my glass. “Maybe half the reason I don’t want you to go is that I’m afraid, Nate.” It feels strange admitting all this to my son. That I am afraid for him. That I mistrust the wider world that he’s about to dive headfirst into. 

“How’d the person die?”

“Complications from Lou Gehrig's disease, know what that is?”

“Is it like AIDS?” 

“ _No_ ,” I say, and am ashamed of the force that’s taken over my voice, “It’s kind of. You lose control of your muscles. Nothing like AIDS.” 

“So you...don’t,” Nathaniel says. “You don’t want me to go. You’ve been lying all this time. You’ve been frittering away money because you want me to fail?” There’s nothing that is even close to forgiving in my son’s voice. “Fuck you, Dad.”

“Language,” I say, falling into an easy patriarchal language trap myself. It’s funny how these things go. “Where’d you even hear that word?” 

“I’m just going, Dad,” my son says, probably wanting to be anything but a part of me. “Do you want me to put Mom back on?” 

“No,” I shake my head. “It’s all right. Good night.” 

 

My father was studying theoretical physics when he met my mother at Berkeley. His research had been cutting edge, exploring the reaction of conscious Shadow particles as a means of navigating space-time. My father was Alexander Payne, you might have seen on him television or read about it in the papers. 

When he’d disappeared for the last and final time, my mother had given the media outlets an unbelievably flattering picture of him, taken days after he’d published his thesis as a monograph. The title was unbelievably hokey: _Shadow Particles and their Impact on Navigating Space-Time_ , by Alexander Payne, Ph.D. 

The picture featured on the book jacket is incredibly morose and proper. My father wears a blue-gray tie, a cream-colored shirt, and stares into the abyss.

 

I finally find my father in the year 1982, in Paris, with a woman half his age in the bath of one of those bohemian apartments that only play at a sort of creative poverty in the sixteenth _arrondissement_. She laughs at me, when she sees me. In 1982, I was and am nineteen and upon examining myself in the cloudy mirror, I look every bit of it, down to the stubborn pimples forming near my hairline. 

My father colors an unnatural plummish pink, but summoning every bit of parental largesse that he can muster in the moment, he tells me to wait for him to get dressed. 

I close the bathroom door behind me and go to wait on a sagging, paint splattered couch. I am careful not to touch anything. 

The girl comes out and waits with me. She shows off her legs and I guess I don’t mind. She brushes damp hair out of her eyes and says, “Are you really Alex’s son?” I wonder if this disgusts her, changes how she views my father sexually. I suppose it’s archaic of me, to think that a man’s worth is bound up with the quality of his sexual prowess and what have you. It also might disturb me just a tad, to think that I am but a 

“After a fashion,” I say. “Not all sons take after their fathers. Sometimes, all we want to do is run far away but we’re always flooded with blood. The blood has a voice, and after a while, it rings and rings until you can’t do anything but let it fill your head. I can do what my father does, but not because I want to.” 

“You are very poetic like Alex, even though he is only a scientist,” she goes through to the kitchen. “Do you want something to drink?” 

“Only if you’ll join me,” I say.

“I can never say no to a drink,” she says. “White wine?”

“I’m not picky,” I say. 

She gets two glasses, fills one, and then the other. “ _Comment tu t’appelles?_ ” 

“Oliver,” I tell her. 

“Are you from the future?” 

“I,” There is something surreal about this. I’ve traveled a few times, but always to find my father when he’d been alone. Apparently Shadow Particles atrophy with long disuse so I’d spent a lot of my childhood in the late fifties, wandering around my father’s desk. Even though he hadn’t paid that much attention to me, it was comforting to be near him, watching him work. Because of the strange shadows I had in my blood, I always felt close to my father.

My father emerges from the woman’s bathroom not only covered in a bathrobe like I had been half-expecting, but he is dressed. 

“What year is it?” He asks, his voice abrupt and all business. 

“1982,” I say. 

“I mean,” he peers at me. “What year have you come from?” 

“1987,” I say. “I’m about to go out of the country. Tomorrow, actually. I promised Mother I would try again.”

“How many times have you tried?” He says. 

“Not that many,” I say. “It’s a very busy time for me.” 

“You’ve never managed to find me before?” 

I shrug, “I think I understand it now, as I’ve gotten older. Must have just missed you, before.” What I don’t say, and what he doesn’t, either, is that maybe he means to miss me. After all, a man doesn’t just disappear into the past because he wants to be found. 

“Where are you going?” my father asks me.

“I’m going to Italy,” I say. “I get to finish my thesis there. I’m a Classicist, so I guess that means I am stuck in the past.” 

And that is the last thing I managed to say to my father. I never see him again.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> So hello! I'm not sure if anyone is still reading this, but inspiration really struck me today and I was able to rework my outline and finishing this now looks possible. A huge thank you to those still following along.
> 
> Alexander Payne's "shadow particles" are borrowed from Philip Pullman's amazing _His Dark Materials_ trilogy which I was revisiting recently. A more detailed explanation will be provided throughout the fic. Oliver's name is a tribute to Dr. Oliver Payne, who also works on shadow particles in _The Subtle Knife_.
> 
> As you may have noticed, this is now 8 chapters long to correspond roughly to 2 chapters per quatrain so that I don't get overwhelmed.


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